A movie that could blend tears and laughter
Journey of a young man turned in an unexpected direction and the woman who helps him brighten his outlook on the world around him.
“How do you say goodbye to someone you've barely said hello to?” asks writer - director Cameron Crowe in his new film, “Elizabethtown.” Crowe, who won an Academy Award in 2000 for his original screenplay for “Almost Famous,” again draws on his own experiences - the emotions he felt at his father's unexpected passing - to inspire a motion picture. “Elizabethtown” is about a quiet Oregon shoe designer who gets to know his father and his own family roots only after his dad's death. He is aided in his journey by an unstoppably optimistic woman, and a host of family members, who combine in unique ways to teach him what's it's like to be truly alive.
Crowe says that one of his goals with “Elizabethtown” was to make the type of film his father liked best: one that could achieve genuine emotion but always with humor close at hand. “A movie that could blend tears and laughter… that was his favorite combo,” says Crowe. “He and my mom actually had a name for that very special mix, they called it `Bread and Chocolate,' after a foreign film they'd fallen in love with. Later, as a director, it became one of my favorite mixes too - a movie that introduced you to characters who felt real, who took you into their lives and when that movie was over… you missed those people you'd met two hours earlier.”
Producer Paula Wagner says, “Besides being one of the great writer-directors of our times, Cameron Crowe is also a chronicler of truth: truth told with a little whimsy, a lot of charm, and great heart. Cameron somehow allows you to laugh at the human foibles of the character and then, a few moments later, shed a tear or two as well. In `Elizabethtown,' Cameron takes us on such a personal journey - and he invites us to feel that the journey is our own.”
“Cameron has an ability to take life and put it on the screen,” says
Orlando Bloom, who takes on the role of the central character, Drew Baylor. “He makes it so real and so human that it just breaks your heart and makes you laugh all at the same time.”
Kirsten Dunst, who plays Claire, the passionately positive flight attendant who changes Drew's life, agrees. “This movie is about life. It's not just a comedy or a just a drama or just a romance - it's just life. It's all about the intimate moments between people. It has so many different stories combined. It's unpretentious and sometimes almost `slice of life' in its reality. But if you look closely, every line and every action means something. It's a Cameron Crowe movie.”
In 1989, Crowe had just seen the theatrical release of his directorial debut, “Say Anything.” The movie had been released quietly, with little fanfare. It's fortunes changed suddenly when the movie received an important early rave review from Siskel and Ebert. Crowe's father was visiting family in Kentucky, having just seen the pivotal positive review and was in the midst of sharing the great news with family members, when he unexpectedly died of a heart attack. It was a blow for the young filmmaker and it left a lasting impression on him.
Several years passed and Crowe's career continued to rise as he wrote and directed films like “Singles,” “Jerry Maguire,” “Almost Famous” and “Vanilla Sky.” All of Crowe's screenplays possess a very personal connection to the filmmaker and “Almost Famous” was no exception. The story, a dramatization of Crowe's own early years as a writer for Rolling Stone, was critically lauded and garnered Crowe an Academy Award® for best screenplay. All of the performances were topnotch, but Frances McDormand's portrayal of the mother in that film stands out as a quirky-yet-loving homage to Crowe's own mother, Alice. With “Elizabethtown,” Crowe found it was time to honor his father.
“It's a funny thing,” says Crowe, “but from the very beginning, I'd always resisted writing very personally about my own life and family. Even the books I loved growing up were rarely first-person stories. Then, when I turned 18, I wrote an article for `Rolling Stone' called `How I Learned About Sex.' It was under assignment, I had run out of other ways to tell the story. I wrote it in first-person. It was instantly a breakthrough for me. People responded resoundingly, immediately, wrote me letters. Friends and editors said, `I felt like you were writing about my life too.' And it's happened consistently ever since. The more personal the story, the more it seemed to matter to people. After `Almost Famous,' I was asked a lot - what about your dad? What was he like? I'd written a short story about him called `My Father's Highway.' It was one of my favorites, though it lived in my drawer. And then one day…”
It was the summer of 2002, shortly after the release of “Vanilla Sky,” and Crowe was on the road touring with his wife, Nancy Wilson, of the rock band Heart. He found himself on a tour bus traveling through Kentucky and was struck by the intense beauty of the landscape. The last time he saw what he calls “these electric blue hillsides” was when he returned for his father's funeral in 1989. That was all the inspiration he needed.
As Crowe recalls, “I dropped off the Heart tour, got a rental car, got lost in Kentucky, and wrote the whole story for the script in a burst.” For Crowe, telling this story was an extremely personal and often emotional endeavor. It was also a feast of colorful characters, and a vivid glimpse of life and loss and inspiration in modern America. “I always liked the idea of telling a story populated with failure and fiasco but in the middle of it is a person who exists only for love,” continues Crowe. “I often write about these characters because they're heroes to me - they breathe in failure and spit it back out and move on. They believe in carrying on with life and honoring positivity. Besides, the other option is a lot darker and usually not as much fun.”
In the film, Drew is at the center of his shoe company's fiasco when he learns that his father has died half a continent away. He is assigned by his mother to travel to Kentucky, retrieve his father's body, and bring him home to Portland, Oregon. That's when Drew runs headfirst into what Crowe calls the film's “messenger of love,” Claire, a flight attendant with a mission: helping someone in trouble. “She immediately makes a project out of him,” Crowe says.
Dunst was attracted to the role by the director's genuine feeling and the honest emotion of the film. She says, “I hope that we made a beautiful story that people will really respond to and get emotionally moved by.”
“Even though Drew is having a terrible day, he is not ready for the news that he receives,” says Crowe. “The career problems he's facing at the beginning of `Elizabethtown' are not real problems, at least not worth the life and death value we tend to assign most daily disappointments. The real problem arrives and it IS life and death. Drew's dad is dead and he never got to know his dad while his dad lived. Like most of us, we assume that somewhere down the line we'll be able to know our parents as adults, as equals… and we'll do all those things together that we put off, year after year. With Claire's inspiration, and an elaborate map, Drew finally comes to know his father, and himself, on that long-delayed get-together, even though one of them is in an urn. It's never too late…”
“The movie ended up almost exactly the way I imagined it when it first arrived as an idea,” continues Crowe. “It starts with an ending, and it ends with a beginning… and hopefully you might leave the theater and look around for a moment and two and maybe think, `I miss those people...'”
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